John Semley
On Sept. 17, 2013, Peter Wald was found dead in his home in Hamilton. He had died eight months earlier. His wife, Kaling, had covered his bloated body with two blankets, put a tuque on his head, padlocked his bedroom door and sealed the vents, so the stench of a festering cadaver in the home wouldn't nauseate the family.
As to the thought of a festering cadaver in the home? Devout Christians, Kaling Wald and her family believed if they prayed hard enough, God would raise Peter Wald from the dead. Just like Jesus himself – who, it should be noted, was up and about in only three days.
The body wasn't discovered until local police came to evict the Walds after they defaulted on their mortgage. When they cracked open the door to Peter's bedroom, authorities found that the mummified corpse had attracted rodents. Neighbours reported masses of flies congregating on the outside of the bedroom window, like something out of The Amityville Horror. The body had decomposed to such a point that the coroner was unable to determine a cause of death. All the same, Kaling Wald had packed a bag for her late husband, still firm in her belief that prayer and prayer alone would deliver him back to the world of the living. "We were trusting in God," she told The Hamilton Spectator. "We thought, 'Okay Lord, you know better.'"
Wald was eventually charged with failing to notify the police or coroner about a dead body. "Your belief that your husband would resurrect is not an issue," Superior Court Justice Marjoh Agro told Wald when she appeared before the court last December. "This is not about your religious beliefs."
But of course it's about her religious beliefs.
While cases like this are (thankfully) pretty rare in Canada, there's plenty of documented evidence stateside of Christian denominations – particularly adherents to the oxymoronically named "Christian Science" – who refuse medical care, steadfast in their belief that sickness can be healed by prayer. And if it's not? Well, then that, too, is God's mysterious handiwork. And who are we to judge? Like Kaling Wald, Christian Science's disciples adopt a resigned pose of "Okay Lord, you know better."
In the United States, the legal issues that arise from such criminal neglect are complicated by the First Amendment's protection of freedom of religion. A sort of legal black hole is jimmied open by the right of an individual to not die (especially if that person is a child) and the right of religious groups to practise their own faith.
In his new book Bad Faith, Paul A. Offit drops himself smack in the middle of this black hole, working through the history of religious-based abuse in a systematic, case-by-case basis. In his introduction, Offit (himself a physician employed by the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia) positions his book in antagonism to the voguish New Atheist literature of Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins et al. Offit states that while he fully expected to use cases of religiously motivated medical negligence and child abuse as a bludgeon against the harmful illogic of religion, he actually ended up warming to the idea of religion. "Somewhere during the process of reading large sections of the Old and New Testament, I changed my mind," he proclaims. "Sort of like the man who went to church to find God, but found religion instead."
As a result, Bad Faith's project is considerably riskier than just lobbing another acutely "rational" and "logical" broadside against organized religion – with all of its superstition, canonical hokum and other mystical baloney. Instead, Offit nobly endeavours to make peace with religion as concept, while simultaneously lambasting its more blinkered, potentially dangerous practitioners.
To ground his (perhaps counterintuitive) argument in support of religion, Offit bookends Bad Faith with the story of Rita Swan, a reformed Christian Science practitioner turned advocate. Founder of the U.S. non-profit Children's Healthcare Is a Legal Duty (CHILD), Swan turned her back on Christian Science following her son's death in 1977 and devoted herself to exposing cases of religious-based child abuse. "The Sabbath was made for man," Swan once said, citing the Gospel of Mark. "Not man for the Sabbath." The lesson, for Swan as for Offit, is that religion should function in the service of humanity and not the other way around.
Offit indexes a whole history of religious abuse, paying particular attention to the United States. He considers whether Christian Science qualifies as a cult, steeped as it is in "the language of non-thought." He also suggests that religious belief, or at least certain iterations of religious belief, can qualify as psychosis. Considering the case of Lucky and Larry Parker – California parents who, in the winter of 1972, essentially let their son die by trying to pray away his diabetes, a story recounted in their own book, literally called We Let Our Son Die – Offit writes that "with people with deeply held religious beliefs, it's often difficult to know where to draw the line between faith and delusion."
There's something nice, even admirable, in Offit acknowledging that there is a line between faith and delusion, unlike the scowling Dawkinsian atheists who hold that all religious belief is inherently aberrant and delusional. But after wading through 200 pages of harrowing cases of religiously abetted child abuse, sharing Offit's cheery reconciliation of religion with the dangerously religious becomes its own act of faith.
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